I graduated from my undergrad in 2016. I went to a liberal arts school that had no majors, because “to profess to know is not to know”. Officially, my undergrad degree is in liberal arts. Unofficially, my credits translate to doing a double major in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Sciences and a double minor in Classics and Comparative Literature. I know this because my paper degree comes along with a small slip of paper written in Latin. And on the back side of that slip of paper is an English translation describing what my liberal art courses translate into.
If we talk over a coffee chat, I can explain more.
The point is that I entered into the job market with bad translation problems. I assumed that everyone else had immediate & obvious relevance to jobs that they (cold) applied to and that everyone else knew how to network.
10 years later after mentoring many, many undergrads across 6 different universities and a range of undergrad degrees, I now know that this is not the case.
No one really knows how to network, and almost all of us feel horribly awkward doing it.1
As I’ve said before, all of my jobs have come through networking. To flip that statement, I’ve never managed to land a job by cold applying. So I am heavily biased towards networking as my personal job hunting strategy. But I’ve learned that
It’s much easier to showcase research relevance to a person, compared to a cold application reviewed by an applicant tracking system (ATS).2
I guess that’s the main point of this post—the numbers game is human.3 I networked A LOT from 2016-2019 (maybe I’ll write a post on this another day) until I applied to grad school. But I think that I got into grad school because of networking.
Major caveat: The tech industry (specifically biotech) was experiencing a major boom around 2016. Since pandemic and academic funding cuts due to our political administration, I very much acknowledge that the job market is completely different. However, since 2023 when I started applying to tech internships during grad school, my networking strategies have not changed much.
How did I pitch myself back then?
One of my undergrad “majors” is in History of Mathematics & Sciences. Not math or science, the history of math and science. I did a lot of chalk board demonstrations back then too. (I went to a weird undergrad.)
Here’s a version of my research pitch that I include in the bio of my personal website:
I did 2 art apprenticeships and then double majored in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Sciences from St. John's College, where I was fascinated by how novel visualizations have catalyzed & been used to communicate humanity's major scientific discoveries to the global public (e.g., Cartesian coordinate system, periodic table, Vitruvian man) — yet, despite this critical role of visual media in human innovation, relatively little is known about how people communicate in visual form. This question continues to inspire my research.
How do I pitch myself now?
Here’s also a (paraphrased) excerpt from my personal website:
My dissertation research evaluated large-scale datasets of drawings, diagrams, and data visualizations. In other words, I studied how people make pictures. Now I study how GenAI models make pictures.
I’ve been doing the picture thing for a while now. It helps to have a common throughput in your research narrative, but I’ve also tried out a number of other pitches that have varied widely. These were the pitches that ended up working best for my current goals & contexts.
AI was not used to write, edit, or brainstorm this post. All mistakes and em dashes are my own.
- See section about mock interviewing in #6 Plan for a 25-30min conversation. Be prepared to lead it. in Networking misconceptions ↩
- See Resumes should be human-readable ↩
- See It’s all about luck, but there are ways to make yourself luckier ↩